Since the birth of our little girl, we have been obsessed with taking pictures and capturing video of family events, cute moments, and blackmail material for those later teenage years.  All those pictures and videos take up space - as does the ever expanding and, mostly, legally acquired music and movie collections.  External firewire/USB drives clutter my work area to accommodate our expanding digital collections.  Of course we can and have kept sporadic back ups to DVD and CD and on a few rare occasions had to recover from that media due to hardware failures and careless mistakes.  I even experimented with a few online storage services, but accessing Gigabytes of data takes time and, it seems, services for Macs are still nascent.

This article describes how I finally established a painless backup solution for my home computers using OS X's Time Machine and a network attached storage (NAS) device - the ReadyNAS NV+.  Using Time Machine with Network Attached Storage (NAS) is disabled in OS X's Leopard (as of version 10.5.2) for anything but Time Capsule.   However, it can be done without too much effort on your part.

NOTE: Since I wrote this, the ReadyNAS guys have come up with an official how-to: "Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS". You may still find these instructions useful.

Read this complete document in its original format.